'Ex Machina,' here we come: A new algorithm helps computers learn the way we do

‘Ex Machina,’ here we come: A new algorithm helps computers learn the way we do

In a ‘visual Turing test,’ human judges couldn’t tell them apart New research pitted humans against machines in a ‘visual Turing test.’ Credit: Danqing Wang IDG News Service Dec 11, 2015 3:46 PM Machine learning is all about getting computers to “understand” new concepts, but it’s still a pretty inefficient process, often requiring hundreds of examples for training. That may soon change, however, thanks to new research published on Friday. Aiming to shorten the learning process and make it more like the way humans acquire and apply new knowledge based on just a few examples, a team of researchers has developed what they call a Bayesian Program Learning framework and then used it to teach computers to identify and reproduce handwritten characters based on just a single example. Whereas standard…